User workstations or subscriber devices, personal computers (PCs), handheld devices, tablet devices, smart phone devices, and other web capable devices operate in a communication network by communicating with controlling devices, servers and access points. In order for the web capable device to receive messages from another device operating in the communication network it needs to subscribe to a broadcasting channel of communication. The subscription process may include, for example, one or more hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP) POST requests. For instance, one POST request may be for a subscription and another POST request may be to acknowledge the subscription.
A POST request is used to send data to be processed to a server, which may be performed by a common gateway interface (CGI) script. A POST request may include a block of data sent with the request in the message body. A POST request may also include extra headers to describe the message body, such as content-type and content-length. The HTTP response is normally program output and is not a static file. POST can be used to request various different data types.
“POST” is one of many request methods supported by the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used by Internet users of the world wide web. The POST request may be used when the client needs to send data to the server as part of the request, for example, when uploading a file or submitting a completed form to a server. In contrast to the more general “get me this resource” (GET) request method, where only a URL and headers are sent to the server, POST requests also include a message body. This allows for arbitrary data length of any type to be sent to the server. For instance, headers used in a POST request may indicate the message body's Internet media type to the server.
In general, POST requests are used to transfer data from a client to a web server since the web server does not log the sent data. This permits binary data to be sent, which is useful for transferring byte arrays or serialized Java objects, such as JavaScript object notation message (JSON) format. POST provides the portability of the request to any server platform. This allows for any web capable server to be a subscriber of the broadcast service without any extra configuration or software, additionally it allows the system to be programming language agnostic because most web languages are capable of consuming POST requests.
Users of web enabled devices may desire to perform administrative functions with minimal input. For example, backend applications, such as general purpose servers, e-mail servers, calendar servers and other communication servers may require substantive administrator experience to configure and execute user commands. Currently, there are various different communication methods implemented between servers which utilize a subscription/subscriber pattern, however, these methods require a live remote connection between servers by utilizing a TCP or UDP-based connection.